“An artist should create beautiful things, but should put nothing of his own life into them.” 

“every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter. The sitter is merely the accident, the occasion. It is not he who is revealed by the painter; it is rather the painter who, on the coloured canvas, reveals himself.” 

“Art is the only serious thing in the world. And the artist is the only person who is never serious.” 

When younger writers and poets, musicians and painters are weakened by a stemming of funds, they come to me saddened, not as full of dreams and excitement and ideas. I am then weakened and diminished, and made less rich.

Every artist was first an amateur.

Because of the routines we follow, we often forget that life is an ongoing adventure. . . Life is pure adventure, and the sooner we realize that, the quicker we will be able to treat life as art: to bring all our energies to each encounter, to remain flexible enough to notice and admit when what we expected to happen did not happen. We need to remember that we are created creative and can invent new scenarios as frequently as they are needed.

Life is pure adventure, and the sooner we realize that, the quicker we will be able to treat life as art.

I make writing as much a part of my life as I do eating or listening to music.

I know that one of the great arts that the writer develops is the art of saying, 'No. No, I'm finished. Bye.' And leaving it alone. I will not write it into the ground. I will not write the life out of it. I won't do that.

Art was an additional emotion applied to skillful technique.

All artists experience a lull in their work. It is a period of replenishing the soil – of plowing in and turning under our past experiences and watering them afresh with new ones.

Lazy thinking is not creative or productive.

“Science is the response to the demand for information, and in it we ask for the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Art is the response to the demand for entertainment, for the stimulation of our senses and imagination, and truth enters into it only as it subserves these ends.”

“Life is an art not to be learned by observation.”

“An artist is a dreamer consenting to dream of the actual world.”

“Nothing is really so poor and melancholy as art that is interested in itself and not in its subject.”

“Advertising is the modern substitute for argument; its function is to make the worse appear the better.”

Life doesn't imitate art, it imitates bad television.

If I was to see any of my films now I would feel, oh god you know it's awful I could do that so much better now. Look at all the terrible things I did and all the mistakes and all the compromises and all the blunders I made, and it would be such a terrible experience for me to see them. So it's better that I put it out and move on to the next thing and make it history as quickly as possible.

To be a film director is not a democracy, it's really a tyranny. You're the head of the project, for better rather than worse. I write the film and I direct the film, I decide who's going to be in it, I decide on the editing, I put in the music from my own record collection.

That’s one of the nice things about writing, or any art; if the thing’s real, it just lives. All the attendant hoopla about it, the success over it or the critical rejection—none of that really matters. In the end, the thing will survive or not on its own merits. Not that immortality via art is any big deal. Truffaut died, and we all felt awful about it, and there were the appropriate eulogies, and his wonderful films live on. But it’s not much help to Truffaut.

My films are a form of psychoanalysis, except that it is I who am paid, which changes everything.

The French make two mistakes about me. They think I'm an intellectual because I wear these glasses and they think I'm an artist because my films lose money.

Film is more of novelty, because I've done so much theater over many years. I'm in love with making movies. Also, I find it easier to remember three minutes of dialogue than three hours.